To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.HEGEL.

She arrived with her  familiar entourage of personal issues & affronts needing to be unloaded into a dear platonic male-friend’s patient ear. Also her most polite manners, for she knew she was in the presence of a gentleman .

  “Hey, freako, how’s the agoraphobic today?” She plunked down on the floor, even though I had a perfectly good armchair, a very solid sort of off-gray one, to match my gray walls. Off came the hat, flung at the D.H. Lawrence section of the bookshelf, but missing, and knocking Hegel on his big ponderous ass. Plunk. Then the boots came off, in a very impatient unladylike squirming. She sighed.

  “Be more mannerly, little miss. I am only quasi-agoraphobic, according to the phase of the moon, I’ve told you that.” I was reclining in my bed/office. The tv was showing Law & Order: Special Victims unit. The one where the cops who never smile solve   horrific sex-abuse crimes that even real live sexual lunatics could never dream up.

  She sighed again. She was a long hippie skirt and black knee socks under a black hoodie that did nothing for her, just what she wanted in an upper body garment. Her feminine charms under there were, let us say, generously provided by  a magnanimous God, though she viewed them as a curse.

  “Why do you keep sighing in my direction,” I inquired.

  “I am just wondering why it is always so hot in here, bub, “ she said, and made a movement to pull off the hoodie, but hesitated. “I suspect  a plot . “

  “Do you, now? “ I muted the tv and turned around to face her accusation head-on.  “You know about my cold-phobia, do you not?”

  She giggled despite herself but kept up the charade. “Nope. Another one of your countless neuroses, no doubt, but not revealed to me. “ Pout. “And I thought I was your bestest friend, too.”

  “Nah, I told you once, but you were probably on heroin or anti-histamines or whatever you could scrounge up that day,” I said as she  undid her skirt and shimmied out of it and let it float in the air over toward the “hard science” section of my bookcase, covering a good 3/4ths of the physics books.  Her panties were pink. Lacy.

  “Oh, yep, that sounds like me. Sorry, so, tell me again, “ she said , grabbing the nearest book on the floor, a bio of Blake. “Arg, him . “ She flipped through it like a born reader, with her hands. I loved watching those hands handle books so reverently. I let myself wonder how those hands might handle me. How they would feel in my hair. And elsewhere.

  “I was  abandoned by my real parents  one winter’s night , way up in Maine, on a frozen lake, near an icefishing hut that was, they didn’t realize, I hope, inhabited by a drunken idiot who didn’t discover me til noon the next morning. I have abandonment issues, but more importantly, I abhor the cold.”

  “Shit, that sure sucks for you. “ She was reading the book with her long fingers and her mouth, subvocalizing the words. She laughed at what she read. “This guy is sure a good choice for your poetic hero. He is a super freak. Might even someone your tv heroes, there, your sex police, might wanna investigate…Listen to this: ‘walking in my cottage garden, sudden I beheld/ the virgin Ololon & addressed her as a  daughter of Beulah:/virgin of providence, fear not to enter into my cottage.”

  “He was a poetic genius, a lot smarter than your Sylvia, or your , what was her name, the other suicidal woman you adore? “  I was wondering if she was going to pull that hoodie off. She kept tugging at it. She was a gal whose temperature always ran higher than human norms, and I could almost feel the heat radiating  from her.

  “I forget. Too much heroin. “ She put the book down and said, “I am gonna take off my hoodie, but I don’t want you to get any male ideas. “

  “Why, what do you have on under there, “ I said, a bit too quickly to be nonchalant.

  “Nothing.” She smiled like a little girl who had outsmarted her clever…uh…older boy cousin.

  I flicked my hand and said, “Tis up to you. I am stalwart in our Platonism. I have proved that. As for ideas, we both know they come unbidden to our heads sometimes, from monstrous parts of ourselves. “

  “Mmm. “ She seemed hesitant. “Welll.. if you took off that bathrobe, which you oughtn’t be wearing at 5 pm in the goddamn evening, I will maybe try and get comfortable in this hothouse of yours, and then we can talk about something more important, like all my damn problems, which are accumulating …um, what’s that word?...precipitously!” Another winning smile.

  “Deal!”

  “Cool! Whatcha got on under there, just for curiosity? “

  “Same as you.”

  “oh.” Ha. Finally, I flummoxed her for a fraction of an instant. “OK!”

  “You first.”

  “Christ, how old are we, here? 12? Fuck. A woman always gotta do the heavy work.” She pulled her hoodie off and threw it at me.

  I stood, bowed to her, and eased out of my warm puffy bathrobe, hanging it on a hook, with her hoodie.

  I joined her on the floor.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

...............................................................................

FOR DYLAN AFFICIANDOS:

( a nasty lost classic i adore, from the Eighties...'seeing the real you at last')

From now on I'll be busyAin't goin' nowhere fast

I'm just glad it's overAnd I'm seein' the real you at last

I'm hungry and I'm irritable

And I'm tired of this bag of tricks

At one time there was nothin' wrong with me

That you could not fix
 

 ]Well, I sailed through the stormStrapped to the mastBut now the time has comeAnd I'm seein' the real you at last

Well, I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble

Trouble always comes to pass

All I care about now

Is that I'm seein' the real you at lasT

 Ohh, yes I am

Whatever you gonna do

Please do it fast

I'm still tryin' to get used to

Seein' the real you at last

Ohh yes I am